Mary River mine needs floating camp, Steensby port, Baffinland tells Nunavut regulator

Here’s an aerial view of the 300-person floating camps that Baffinland wants to use for workers at Steensby Inlet. The camps were used by Newmont to house workers at its Hope Bay gold mine, which it sent into “care and maintenance” last January. Baffinland wants to tow them to Steensby Inlet next August. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The use of floating accommodations for a work camp and the construction of a port at Steensby Inet are essential for Nunavut’s giant Mary River iron mine project to move ahead.

That’s the gist of correspondence sent March 14 from Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. to the Nunavut Impact Review Board.

There’s no other affordable alternative to housing the 600 workers it needs, said an attachment to a letter signed by Erik Madsen, Baffinland’s vice-president of sustainable development, health, safety and environment, to the NIRB’s executive director Ryan Barry.

Extra expenses due to delays in starting on-site work would result from the construction of a “land-based hard wall camp.”

These might have “severe repercussions on the project economic viability,” Baffinland said.

And without Steensby Inlet as the site for a port for year-round iron shipments, Mary River is “not a project,” Baffinland stated in another attachment to the March 14 letter.

It said Baffinland has already looked at the economics and lay-out involved in using other sites and they didn’t work.

Earlier this month, Baffinland received a blow to its plans for 2012-13 when the company learned it wouldn’t be able to keep 10 million litres of fuel on a barge in Steensby Inlet throughout next winter.

The NIRB decided that there was a “risk of a large accidental fuel spill which could cause irrevocable harm to the local Arctic marine environment.”

Baffinland, a private company now under the control of ArcelorMittal, the European steel-making giant, and a private investment firm, Iron Ore Holdings LP, wants to see the Mary River mine churn out about 18 million tonnes of iron ore a year, which will then be shipped out year-round to markets in Europe and Asia for at least 20 years — and some predict up to 100 years.

The Mary River project took an important step forward Feb. 29, when the NIRB ruled Baffinland’s final Environmental Impact Statement “positively complies” with guidelines and the preliminary hearings’ decisions issued for the project.

Baffinland then had two weeks to outline its approach to addressing remaining deficiencies and clarifying more than 60 items, as identified by NIRB.

These included a call for more information on its choice of Steensby Inlet for a port and about its plan for a floating camp at Steensby Inlet.

In its March 14 response, Baffinland said several alternatives were considered for housing the 600 workers needed at Steensby.

For the operation phase of the mine, a “land based hard wall camp” is required, it said.

But building that now would take up valuable time and money.

Bringing in the construction materials for the camp “would seriously limit the capacity and logistics of receiving equipment, material and supplies for the first open water season of the construction phase.”

And the cost of flying in construction material and supplies to build a camp, or using icebreakers to accompany vessels delivering supplies to the site during the winter period would be “prohibitive,” Baffinland said.

Building a camp on land would delay work by a year, and “extending the construction phase by one year also has severe repercussions on the project economic viability,” it said.

Ironically, the floating camp barges are the same ones that were to be used during the development of the Hope Bay gold mine near Cambridge Bay, which Newmont Mining Corp. put into “care and maintenance” earlier this year, possibly due to frustrations over rising costs and delays in moving the project ahead.

As for Baffinland’s choice of Steensby Inlet for its port, NIRB and communities wanted more information on alternative port sites which would be evaluated on their feasibility, economic viability, environmental acceptability and social/community acceptance.

To that request, Baffinland provided a short answer: a port alternative that is not technically feasible or economically feasible is “not a project.”

“As indicated at the Pre-Hearing Conference, if an alternative was not considered technically feasible or economically feasible, it was eliminated from further assessment,” it stated.

On many items needing clarification or more information, Baffinland indicated where to locate the information in its 10-volume final EIS, or stated “information provided is adequate for the effects assessment.”

The final EIS and all associated correspondence and documentation can be accessed online from the NIRB’s public registry.